The present invention is directed to on-line advertising and, more particularly, to the generation of data for on-line advertising and to the display of on-line advertising.
The display of keyword-triggered advertisements on the same web pages that provide responses to Internet search queries has been shown to be extremely profitable. Typically, users carry out searches of the Internet by entering one or more keywords as a query into a search engine or similar web page. The search engine then provides the results of the search on one more web pages that show the search results arranged according to some predetermined order or ranking.
Recently, location-based advertising has been introduced to deliver advertisements that are targeted to the current location of a user or to a location specified by the user as part of the search query. As an example, in response to a user query for camera stores located in Manhattan, the user may be shown ads for stores located solely in New York City. However, the generation of a sufficient inventory of location-based ads for a given advertiser is often difficult. In addition to storing the ad content and keywords that are currently used to supply keyword-triggered advertisements, every store location of the advertiser may also need to be stored, thereby greatly increasing the amount of information to be stored.
Inventories of location-based advertisements are often generated by manually entering store locations into a file. For large chain advertisers, large amounts of data must be entered and such entry is often too cumbersome to be worth their effort. Alternatively, some mechanism for uploading data files containing store locations is provided. For entry or file uploading to be carried out, however, both the advertiser and the search engine provider must agree on a common format for the data as well as agree on a method of periodically updating and/or uploading the data. As a result, location-based advertising has not been adopted by many advertisers.
Often, a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model is used in which the advertiser only pays when a user actually clicks on an advertisement to visit the web site of the advertiser. However, many businesses are not interested in the Internet traffic generated by an ad as their sales are more dependent on the amount of “foot-traffic” such ads generate, i.e., the number customer drawn into their stores by an ad. For such advertisers, ads that merely provide customers with a link to the advertisers' web site is not that valuable.
Some mapping sites display conventional content-advertisements based on locations shown on a map in response to a location inquiry by a user. Such advertisements, however, may not be targeted to the particular interests of the user. Alternatively, other mapping sites provide permanent links which show the advertiser's locations on the map. Such advertisements likewise do not target the user's interest and may be of little help to the user.
Keyword-triggered ads may also be sold which appear directly on the displayed map. However, advertisements in this form may be of limited value to advertisers because only a few lines of ad copy can be shown and often only appear for limited durations. Moreover, such advertisements do not show other information that is of interest to the user, such as the advertiser's retail locations, and do not provide the user with any relation between the displayed map and the advertised business, such as by showing store locations on the map.